Lac-Mégantic: Sense of community lost

Standing on a new boardwalk, visitors look out at the former downtown core of Lac-Mégantic on Saturday. June 28.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

Welcome to Lac-Mégantic’s new commercial district. This sign sits at the intersection of Papineau and Komery Sts.Phil Carpenter
/ The Gazette

Eighty-year-old Hervé St. Pierre at his favourite spot in Lac-Mégantic, Chez LouLou. He likes to have a coffee there and chat with whoever else is there at the time.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

Putting their stamp on the new town: Lac-Mégantic resident Katy Cloutier signs one of the beams for Lac-Mégantic’s new Musi-Café during construction work in May. The old Musi-Café was destroyed one year ago in the town’s deadly train derailment and explosion.Dario Ayala
/ The Gazette

Residents walks along the empty section of new commercial condos in Lac-Mégantic.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

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Lac-Mégantic — Léonce Fortier is already beginning to forget what downtown Lac-Mégantic looked like before it burned to the ground last summer.

He can recall the broad strokes: the turn-of-the-century brick buildings that offered a view of the lake and surrounding mountains. The train station akin to something lifted from the English countryside and the way Frontenac St. snaked its way uphill toward the imposing, gothic-style Ste-Agnès Church.

“There was an amazing sense of community; you knew the other shop owners because they were your friends. They would wave to you, say ‘Hello’ and come by the store for an afternoon beer,” says Fortier, an elderly man who restored antique furniture in a shop on Frontenac St. “It’s going to be impossible to just re-create that.”

Beyond the intangible memories and sense of space that were lost in the fire, downtown was also the physical legacy of Lac-Mégantic’s history as an industrial hub of early 20th century Quebec. The library, the city archives and the records of that history are mostly gone.

There’s a fear in town that whatever is built over the ruins will somehow erase the past and fail to replicate the charm that brought people to Lac-Mégantic.

“It’s a perfectly natural fear, that the town has already suffered one tragedy and that it will suffer another by losing touch with its past,” said David Hanna, an urban studies professor at Université du Québec à Montréal.

A town, Hanna says, is a lot like a home. Beyond its strictly functional needs — sewers, government services and grocery stores to name a few — the town has to exude a sense of comfort, Hanna argues.

“Homes are full of comfort items, they’re full of items of symbolic value, there are colours that are meaningful and so on,” he says. “We need the same thing in cities, as well. You have to have a town that feels comfortable, not just one that works.

“To make that happen it has to be walkable, it has to give a sense of intimacy and it does have to convey a sense of history. Unfortunately, that one’s a tall order because the history has been blown up. So what do you do?”

Fortier’s store burned down alongside the 40 or so buildings that were razed that night in July. It may have just been mortar, wood and glass, but those materials created visual cues of the past.

“Talking a walk along Frontenac St. was one of the best parts of my day. It was beautiful,” says Fortier, who remembers working in his father’s downtown hardware store as a youngster. “It was home.”

Now, there are 10-metre mounds of gravel and stone in their place, surrounded by mechanical diggers, steel fences and pickup trucks. The charred post office still stands across from a few shops that somehow resisted the explosion. Those buildings are, in a sense, suspended in time — an inescapable reminder of the town’s most painful moment.

Lac-Mégantic is moving forward. The liquor store and other businesses were rebuilt across from the newly-constructed hockey arena. They are arranged in the same way a strip mall would be: cube-shaped buildings finished with muted colours — indistinguishable from the shopping plazas that seem to line every highway town in Quebec.

In mid-June — after public consultations with about 300 citizens from Lac-Mégantic — the provincial government unveiled its plan to revamp the heart of downtown. The new city will feature bike paths, outdoor public markets and a concert venue.

The IBA/DDA urban planning firm devised the blueprint for downtown. The firm also worked on the Faubourg Boisbriand shopping mall, the McGill University Hospital Centre and resorts at Mont-Tremblant.

Support for the plan is mixed, with critics fearing the firm won’t be able to put lightning in a bottle and recapture what made the little town a charming place.

Nancy Quirion, who lost her restaurant in the fire, says the downtown’s charm was part of what made her business a success. After working as a baker in Lac-Mégantic for years, she took a chance in 2006 and opened a little breakfast joint out of an abandoned auto repair garage on Frontenac St.

Sitting inside the new hockey arena, she opens a folder full of photographs. There are pictures of breakfast platters with buttery croissants, overflowing with fruit and pastries. Others show the café’s terrasse, which was full most mornings, across from city hall.

“People wandered in from all over the region because this (town) is such a pleasant place,” she says. “The business was my life, it was my passion and I think that came through in my cooking. But the downtown atmosphere really helped us. People drove through on their motorcycles, stopping in for a coffee and breakfast on our terrasse. We were just down the street from the lake.”

Quirion struggled to secure a spot for her business in what will be the new downtown area. She just signed a two-year lease to operate out of the ground level of a condo building, but acknowledges that things just won’t be the same.

A sense of familiarity — or lack of it — can be a powerful emotional trigger, says Camillo Zacchia, a psychologist at Montreal’s Douglas Institute. As can the sight of the scarred downtown

“We have these specific memories in our lives that become associated with stimuli around them,” he said. “So downtown (Lac-Mégantic), with its old buildings and familiar places, came with its own set of memories that stimulate some sort of emotional reaction. I don’t think that not having a downtown will take away positive memories, but the changes and the memories of whatever happened are going to come back when you’re in the area. It’s a reminder, like visiting someone’s home after they died or the anniversary of a death.

“In some ways you’re going to lose a sense of familiarity. But you’re also going to be reminded of the loss when you’re seeing the changes. Everything associated with the event is all going to bring you back in time and to all those people who were connected to that night.”

Despite much of the pain that’s come with the changes ahead for Lac-Mégantic, Zacchia says that if the reconstruction is done right, it can become an essential part of the healing process.

“When you rebuild, when you honour people’s memories, there begins to be a sense of closure,” he said. “It’s emotional and it’s difficult, but it’s essential.”

Since last summer’s derailment in the town’s commercial centre, about 70 per cent of downtown business owners have moved on, relocating near new condominiums that went up close to the hockey arena.

Fortier now does some restoration work from home, and installs blinds for some of his former customers. Lost in the fire were his tools, his wares and a collection 400 antique photos of Lac-Mégantic that date back to the 1800s. Because of complications with his insurance company, he’s been able to collect only $4,000 in government aid in exchange for his life’s work.

“Lately, my work hasn’t exactly been the Klondike gold rush,” he says, sipping a glass of Bud Light inside a diner on the edge of town. “You learn to live with it.”

There’s no guarantee Fortier will have a fresh start in the new city centre, since he rented his shop instead of owning the building that housed it.

“It’s not so bad for me, I’m old now,” he says. “It’s the young people I worry about. It’s already hard enough to get them to stay in a small town. Both my boys moved away when they grew up. What’s going to keep kids here now?”

Some elder residents of the city don’t see much of a future for themselves in town, either.

After their Frontenac St. decorations store burned down last year, Jean Tanguay and his wife, Céline Turcotte, told The Gazette they weren’t sure they wanted to stick around. The sight of downtown, they said, was a constant reminder of the tragedy, and since neither of their daughters still lived in town they saw little reason to stay.

Now, their lakefront home is for sale and the couple won’t reopen their popular downtown business.

With or without the original store owners of Frontenac St., the provincial government is moving ahead with a plan to rebuild.

Fortier says that if he tries hard enough, he can picture the old downtown in his mind. But mostly, that place exists in memories that are beginning to fade with age.

“We lost a lot of good people that day,” Fortier says, holding back tears. He looks out the window and readjusts his cardigan before smiling. “There’s no denying that. Everything else seems insignificant compared to that.”

On Saturday, we wrap up our weeklong Lac-Mégantic series by focusing on town’s future. What will tomorrow’s Lac-Mégantic look like, and what do residents think of these rebuilding plans?

And on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the derailment, we take a detailed look at what happened that night. We’ll present what we’ve learned over the year about how such a tragedy could have happened, and we’ll also detail which questions have yet to be answered.

Look for these stories in tomorrow’s Extra section, and review the entire series online at montrealgazette.com/lac-megantic

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